Last week was a glorious week. Sarah Palin had her first television interview since becoming the VP nominee for the GOP. There was great anticipation for the event. It was the first time the world would hear her speak unscripted. And it did not disappoint.
But we here in the land of viral video want more than just one hot political interview... and as luck would have it, our wish was granted. John McCain ventured onto 'The View' the day after Palin sat down with Charlie Gibson. The matchup on The View was everything it was billed to be: confrontational, awkward, and the invocation of slavery by Whoopi Goldberg. In other words, viral video gold.
To put these political titans to the test – to see who rules the viral video roost of the GOP ticket – we began measuring the viral video views each interview collected the day after it was aired. Palin scored big time, grabbing 2.3+ million views the day after it all went down. McCain’s performance did well too, garnering 1.1+ million views. Advantage: Palin.
Overall, Palin’s interview generated more than 3.7 million views to McCain’s 2 million. To put this into perspective, Palin’s lauded acceptance speech at the GOP chocked up 2.3 million views. McCain’s acceptance speech pulled in just over 600,000. This means that The View produced 3 times as many views for McCain as his acceptance speech. Knock yourself out -- comments are always welcome! -- trying to ascribe meaning to this.
At the end of the week, however, the audience voted with its mouse in favor of, not all that surprisingly, comedy: Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live impression of the gung-ho Alaskan governor skyrocketed to 11.2+ million views this week.
In fact, all of the major viral video events for team McCain/Palin combined didn't hold a candle to SNL’s latest skit.
Oof. Perhaps the McCain campaign should be reaching out to the writers at SNL?
Life is pretty busy here at Visible Measures these days, though we're currently looking into all sorts of viral video trends like Microsoft’s new $300 million ad campaign, celebrity arrests (hi Kanye!), and Palin’s latest interviews. As always, let us know of any match-ups you’d like us to investigate.
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 95+ million Internet videos from 100+ video-sharing destinations.